Conductive materials have magnetostrictive properties that cause the materials to change shape in the presence of an applied magnetic field. The inverse is also true. When a force is applied to a conductive material, the magnetic properties, such as magnetic permeability, of the material change. A magnetostrictive sensor may sense the changes in magnetic permeability and, because the changes are proportional to the amount of stresses applied to the conductive material, the resulting measurement may be used to calculate the amount of stress.
The changes in the magnetic permeability as a result of stress being applied to the conductive material, however, may be small, making accurate measurement difficult. At least some known magnetostrictive sensors are manually aligned and a gap is set by a gauge. Such alignment can result in different air gaps being defined between each detector pole of the sensor. In such known magnetostrictive sensors, a computing system may be used to offset the sensor detection values to attempt to accommodate misalignment of the sensor. Such operations, however, can result in an inaccurate measure of stress in the conductive material, and/or can result in difficulty of calibrating the magnetostrictive sensing system.